Dream Stones

- an XR piece for the Quest3 headsets

Inspired by Christine Brock-Rose's "Xorandor" and the Sapara mythology, the work "Dream Stones" invites you to an AR experience in which the perception of time is synchronized between people and stones. Through the collaborative manipulation of the virtual and the physical, viewers enter into a dialog with the dream stone worlds. With this work, Simon Speiser and Norbert Pape expand their investigation of embodied immersion, which they began in "Touching Clouds", to include questions of co-presence, both of humans and of other (artificial) forms of intelligence.

Some thoughts relating to the work:

Being told to 'go outside and touch grass' is an absurd means of telling someone they have spent too much time online and that they must reconnect with the natural world. Besides implying a rather simplistic dichotomy of natural and technological there is the more interesting question of what makes the natural world or the organic calming, grounding, or capable of extending our senses? There is also, beneath this impulse, an assumption that our encounter with nature is immediate and untroubled with other temporalities.

VR is capable of making practical or aesthetic-somatic tests of this question, for instance, if the movement of the grass in the wind is calming, and this movement can be simulated, what then makes up for the unnaturalness of technologically meditated scenes? The point is not to simulate the organic world, but to close the gap by way of analyzing and approximating the movements, noise and patterns of any visual phenomenon and experiment with their decontextualization. This kind of indirect simulation of life is deeply indebted to understandings and implementations of noise.

Balancing complexity and computability, noise has proven crucial to breathing life into artificial environments and thus increasing their immersive qualities. Perlin noise, for example, was developed by Ken Perlin for the production of nature-like effects on computer-generated surfaces and is used for generating realistic looking terrain, but also the effect of wind on fields of grass. Inversely, it has since been used to develop more robust modeling in physics, finance, economy and signal-processing techniques. Similarly, the boids (short for bird-oid object) algorithm was developed by Craig Reynolds for simulating the complex emergent behavior of flocks of birds. First published in the field of computer graphics, the algorithm now finds applications in fields such as ecology, biology, robotics and urban planning.

Interestingly, Perlin and Reynolds developed these techniques while working on the science fiction film Tron (1982), a film about entities in cyberspace becoming autonomous from their users and about the (however fantastical) transits between the virtual and the real. Our interest here is then not so much the efficacy of simulation, or reduction of the natural world to data, but that the virtual dimension of the technological grasped through noise indicates a far more productive continuity revealed in digital practices.

Dream Stones thereby simulates comfortable naturalness by prying apart immediacy by way of lithic oracles (talking stones) while instigating a different form of calm exploration, where a quiet familiarity is more connective than a familiar naturalness.

Minimal technical requirements:

- two Oculus Quest 3 headsets
- an empty space of at least 50 sqm